Where pop culture and the social sciences COLLIDE! A satirical(?) blog analyzing mass media trends and a place to get all psychosocial about consumerism...even if you DON'T think the Internet is a principality of the US.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Five World War II Myths That Are Complete B.S.

A quick round-up of a few mistruths routinely bandied about regarding W.W.II

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Hey, a listicle outlining erroneous assumptions about World War II ... how original!"

Perhaps this is indeed territory oft trudged by lesser websites, but I figured there were still falsehoods a plenty circling World War II that really haven't been addressed by that many web articles, and for some reason or another, haven't been given the glorious public debunkings they really deserve.

Think you have a firm grasp of why Hitler never invaded Switzerland, or why the Japanese never tried to carpet bomb Nebraska? Well, think again, Holmes ... as it turns out, our mutual misunderstanding of what went on during the Greatest War of 'Em All is enough to fill several history books.

Myth Number One:

Germany never invaded Switzerland because they feared their armed citizenry.

While the Wehrmacht made their best efforts to completely flatten continental Europe into a pancake of Aryan subjugation, a few countries remained unoccupied by Hitler’s forces. Spain and Portugal were spared Nazi wrath, and try as he may, old Adolf never could mount a full out assault on Great Britain. Furthermore, quite a few countries, including Denmark and Finland, actually fared pretty well against German invasions, with Norway having the proud distinction of kicking Stalin AND Hitler’s ass at various points throughout World War II.

Indeed, Hitler had plans at one point to mount an invasion against Switzerland -- he even had as many as 500,000 Italian and German troops ready to pounce as soon as he gave the signal. Alas, Hitler never gave the go-ahead, a military maneuver that, to this very day, inspires great debate among armchair generals.

While the NRA crowds love to extol Switzerland as an example of how an armed public prevents fascism, the reality is that Switzerland’s rifle-toting homeowners probably had little-to-nothing to do with Hitler’s about-face on invasion.

To begin, let’s mull a little logic here. The Swiss had a fairly sizable armed militia, to be sure, but you know who had even more guns than they did? THE SOVIET UNION, WHICH HITLER INVADED TWO YEARS AFTER ABANDONING OPERATION TANNENBAUM. To say the Hitler was too much of a pussy to go after Switzerland when he then took on the most massive army in modern history just months later kind of lays waste to the whole hoplophobia argument. If Hitler was afraid his troops would have been shot, methinks he probably wouldn’t have sent his own boys into the meat grinder against Stalin’s considerably more powerful artillery units.

Furthermore, the invasion of Switzerland served no real strategic importance to the Nazis. In case you didn’t know, Switzerland is basically a giant landlocked salad, buffered all the way around by rocky terrain. With no waterway access, its geographic value in the middle of a freaking war was practically nil. Why would Hitler want to squander the time and manpower and put soldiers at risk to take over something that wouldn’t serve as a launching pad to the eastern or western theaters, precisely?

The Japanese never invaded the U.S. homeland because the public was well-armed.

It’s the same argument as with the Switzerland situation, only intensified a million times because we’re talking about ‘MURICA, dad-burn-it.

So, in 1941, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. We don’t think that shit’s cool, so we vote to go to war and show Hirohito and his troops what-for. While a huge component of raising war support in the States centered around fears of a second Japanese attack, the Imperialists never made a full-scale attack on the U.S. homefront. According to oh-so-ardent gun advocates, that’s because the U.S., much like the Swiss, had their shotguns a ‘ready in case Tojo came a knocking on any doors in the Heartland.

Secondly, I don’t know how many of you were aware of this, but between the U.S. West Coast and Japan, there’s this thing called “The Pacific Ocean.” It’s really big, and it would take a long time for Japanese attackers to make it to Los Angeles -- if they could even make it to San Francisco before running out of gas altogether. For any kind of major (and non-submarine-launched)aerial or naval attack on U.S. soil to have transpired, the Japanese would have needed some sort of mid-Pacific launching pad, which would have been easily picked up by U.S. radar. If a Japanese armada were coming, U.S. military would have had not just hours, but days of advance notice. As a general rule, that usually doesn't bode well for a sneak attack's success rate.

We’ve all heard the narrative a million times: the U.S., having crippled the Japanese navy, now found themselves facing a long, grueling ground battle against the Imperialists. With resources diminishing, the Japanese were ready to fight a suicidal battle against occupying troops, with some early estimates tabbing as many as 1.7 million casualties -- with as many as 800,000 U.S. fatalities-- in a full-fledged invasion of the Japanese mainland.

The unfathomably high death toll, we have all been told, is the primary reason why Truman went ahead with the decision to bomb Japan. The thing is, by the time the U.S. was mulling dropping the bomb, the Japanese military was pretty much already defeated. The Battle of Midway had more or less eradicated the Japanese Navy, and the nation's infrastructure had already been reduced to rubble and ashes thanks to daily air raids. The fire bombing campaign of 1944, it is perhaps worth noting, resulted in a higher body count than the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.

And even if a mainland invasion were to occur, it's not like the U.S. would have gone into battle all by their lonesome -- but more on that in just a bit.

A popular hypothesis that has arisen over the last 50 years has been the possibility that Truman authorized the bombing of Japan not to goad the Imperialists into surrendering ASAP, but rather, to scare the ever-loving dog shit out of the Soviets, who were clearly the other big victor coming out of World War II.

Ultimately, the real reason why the U.S went ahead with the bombings may have had little to do with ending the Pacific war as soon as possible, and a whole hell of a lot more with justifying the costs of the Manhattan Project. After spending more than $2 billion on developing the bombs, which is well over $25 billion in 2014 dollars, who is to say there wasn't an eagerness to reap the fruits of all of that secretive -- and pants-pissingly-horrific -- R&D?

Myth Number Four:

The atom bombing of Japan was the reason why Japan surrendered.

Looking at the chronology of World War II, it seems about the most obvious thing in the world. Nagasaki and Hiroshima both get a nice big dose of radioactive death in August 1945, and what do you know, Hirohito surrenders just a few days later. It’s about the simplest example of cause and effect there is, no?

Clearly, the atom bombings alone weren't the final domino that lead to Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allies. The same date Nagasaki was bombed, something else happened, which probably had a greater influence on the Japanese leadership's decision to finally call it quits.

In 1941, the Russians and Japanese signed a neutrality pact. It did pretty much what it sounded like, insuring that no matter what happened in WWII, the two countries would never attack each other. This is pretty important, because the two nations had been unofficially warring over Asian territory since the early 1930s.

On Aug. 5, 1945, the Ruskies said fuck the pact, insinuating the Japanese had violated the agreement. This, interestingly enough, occurred just 90 days after the Yalta Conference, in which the Russians agreed to enter the Pacific War on behalf of the Allies following Germany's surrender.

A whole lot of Jewish people died in World War II -- as many as 6 million, actually. While many historically-naïve folks consider that to be the absolute worst ethnic cleansing episode of the 1900s, it’s far from it. In fact, it’s not even the greatest Nazi-perpetrated genocide, in total victims, to happen during WWII.

Of course, none of this is to say that the Jewish Holocaust wasn't a horrible moment in history. It was indelibly tragic, but the frank reality? It was far from aberrational, and unquestionably, nowhere close to being the largest genocide of the war.

About Your Friendly Neighborhood Jimbo...

Greetings, Intraweb travelers! My name is Jimbo X (an unusual surname, I know...I think it's Greenlandic) and I'm your kindly proprietor of IIIA. You're probably wondering what the intent of this site is, so that makes two of us. I suppose it's an info-dump for all of the stuff that I find fascinating/irksome about American culture and society, so you'll find a nice jumble of high culture snobbery and low culture sleaze here. It's also a place for me to rant, rave and ramble about all sorts of things that matter and don't matter, so prepare yourself for some heavy-handed bloviating about politics and consumption. Well, that, and lots of stuff about video games and junk food. The things that matter the most obviously.